HALIFAX - The owner of a Dartmouth Chinese food restaurant is looking for an elderly customer who left behind a large amount of cash after eating dinner there Saturday night.
Greg Fong of the Garden View Restaurant said an elderly woman took a younger woman and three girls there around 9:30 p.m.
He guesses it was a grandmother with her daughter and three granddaughters. They stayed about 45 minutes and left, which is when a waitress found an envelope holding well over $500.
"We have it all on video," Fong said of the ladies' visit and the waitress's discovery of the money.
"It was the grandmother who lost it. The way it looks is that this was to be some sort of a present."
He said waitress Laura MacKinnon found the money when she was cleaning up, right after the people left.
"She picked it up and then she immediately brought it to my attention."
There was nothing to identify the envelope's owner and the group's bill was paid in cash.
Fong has yet to call the police. He said he eventually will but believes they'd be unlikely to track down the money's rightful owner before Christmas.
He's hopeful that the local media help solve the mystery by airing some surveillance video and someone recognizes them.
He wouldn't say exactly how much money was left behind or what the envelope looked like, in case someone tries to wrongly claim the money.
Fong said they have had similar situations in the past, but usually someone showed up to claim the forgotten item.
"There's a likelihood that she doesn't know that she's lost this money," he said.